OOMouse Is Built For Hardcore Office Users (Yeah, Seriously!)

Razer's Naga had an awful lot of buttons. But with all due respect,
those buttons had a purpose. For avid gamers that spent the most of
their time within a MMO such as World of Warcraft, those extra thumb
buttons sure come in handy. But seriously--is there anyone out there
who would actually confess to being an avid Office user?

The OOMouse is easily one of the most unique (and odd) mice we have
ever seen, and frankly, one of the ugliest as well. We had to double
check in order to make sure this mouse didn't actually first see the
light of day in the mid-90s, but amazingly, it just launched this past
week. It was designed and built by WarMouse, and it's said to be the
"first multi-button application mouse designed for a wide variety of
software applications, including Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk AutoCAD,
Microsoft Office, and OpenOffice.org."

So, what does a mouse catering to Office users require? Apparently it
requires 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52
key commands, as that's exactly what this mouse offers. Supposedly,
this layout provides a faster and more efficient user interface for
most complex software
applications than the conventional icons, pull-down menus, and hotkeys
presently permit, but it sure seems to us that this array of buttons
would complicate matters. Of course, maybe we're just simple minded
fools, but this seems like a crazy amount of buttons to remember. We're
struggling to remember Copy and Paste, we're pretty sure 18 commands
would slip our minds.

It'll cost you $74.99, and it'll run on Linux, Windows and Mac systems. Anyone crazy enough to splurge?

The OOMouse includes default profiles for the five core
OpenOffice.org applications based on 662 million datapoints compiled by
the usage tracking facility incorporated into OpenOffice.org 3.1. These
profiles can be easily customized to suit the user's preferences using
the included OOMouse setup software. The setup and customization
software is an application that will be released as an open source
software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3
in the first quarter of 2010. Default profiles for 20 other games and
applications are also included; the OOMouse supports up to 63 profiles
to be stored simultaneously in the mouse's memory.

The OOMouse is one of the first computer mice to incorporate an
analog joystick and the first to permit the use of the joystick as a
keyboard. In the three joystick-as-keyboard modes, the user can assign
up to sixteen different keys or macros to the joystick, which provides
for easy movement regardless of whether the user is flying through the
cells of a large spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or on the back of an
epic flying mount in World of Warcraft.